The Uncivilize method is designed to gain clarity, imagine ways for personal and systemic change and explore how to make them real
How do we break free?
The change we need is deep, and all-encompassing. Many of us grew up as consumers in our capitalistic culture. It shaped the way we look at the world. We live and breathe its values, and reinforce them everyday in the way we eat, learn, care, rest, create, and work together.
How can we possibly change a global system, that is so deeply engrained in us?
Where do we even begin? Where do we find the energy, in a system that is designed to exhaust? That makes us believe our only power lies in our role as consumers? And that creates the illusion that we need to solve it all on our own?
The Uncivilize Method
We are trapped in a system that promised prosperity — but delivers exhaustion. A story that equates progress with growth, convenience, and control. That story has reached its limits, keeping us stuck in patterns that exploits people, communities, and the planet.
To move beyond this, we first need to see differently. The Uncivilize Method helps you break through the conditioning of modern industrial life. It reveals that beyond the dominant Global Mode, there are also Local, Domestic, and Wild modes — each a living system, time-tested and still evolving.
When we look closely, we see that these modes generate other kinds of wellbeing — social, spiritual, physical, environmental — while using far less energy and resources. Measured this way, they may in fact be more civilized than the industrial model that claims to define civilization itself.
At first, these modes can be hard to recognize, but you'll notice they feel deeply familiar — resonating in our genes and collective memory. They offer simple, practical, joyful ways to reimagine how we live and work. Our method helps you see these alternatives — to let creativity flow again and to combine modern insights with more resilient, regenerative ways of being and working.
After exploring modes individually, ideas from all four modes are woven into new practices, businesses, or solutions — rich living networks where each element strengthens the others. Together, they create value and resilience across economy, community, household, and nature. This is not theory — it’s a way to unlearn, to see clearly, and to begin building the future differently.
We already know how to live better lives
Let’s make it concrete. Think of the egg you had for breakfast:
In Wild Mode, the egg is a gift from nature. No coop, no feed. You find it if you’re lucky, whoever is hungriest gets it.
In Domestic Mode, it comes from your own chickens. Fed with scraps, roosting in the backyard. Each chicken has a name, not a barcode.
In Local Mode, it’s from a farm collective. Shared land, shared care, shared yield.
In Global Mode, it’s a subsidized product of the industrial food system, handled by robots and information technology, fed with imported soy and stabilized with antibiotics. The production involves every imaginable industry from transport and packaging to information technology and finance. Ready for pickup at the supermarket.
These modes aren’t just about eggs. They’re four distinct relationships to the world, and they’re all available to us, even if we’ve been conditioned to believe otherwise.
We need to flip our idea of civilization, to move forward.
We still live under the spell of Enlightenment ideas — progress as endless growth, the separation of mind and body, humans and nature.
In this story, civilization is measured in material terms: GDP, consumption, convenience. And by those measures, we are the most affluent apes in history — we have the most stuff, use the most energy, and enjoy the highest comfort ever recorded.
But this version of civilization is showing its cracks. As commodification strips away what once gave meaning, and as the pursuit of growth collides with ecological and human limits, we realize that material wealth does not equate to wellbeing. Diseases of affluence rise, mental health declines, and the promises of progress ring hollow.
Meanwhile, anthropology and sociology reveal that our ancestors — and many contemporary small-scale societies — lived with far less energy yet experienced deeper connection, purpose, and contentment. Measured in wellbeing per unit of energy, modern industrial life performs worst of all.
If civilization means the art of living well together on this planet, then we are not the pinnacle of civilization. We consume the most energy and inflict the greatest harm to produce a shallow form of comfort. To move forward, we need to flip our idea of civilization itself — from domination and growth to balance, reciprocity, and the regeneration of life.
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Finding new paths forward
Rather than doubling down on the dominant system and its faith in technology fixes, The Uncivilize Method invites us to explore other pathways.
When we move away from abstract, invisible global solutions, we become less dependent on anonymous supply chains and more rooted in our immediate surroundings. The land, people, and resources around us stop being distant concepts and become part of our lived reality: our neighborhood, the local forest, our own ability, friends and neighbors.
Local Mode helps us discover community, local resources and infrastructure — where value is created shared and anchored in the region, using appropriate technology, resilient, and energy-light.
Domestic Mode reminds us that we don’t always need to outsource care or production. We can make, repair, and create ourselves. When you bake your own bread, repair your clothes, or grow your own food, you’re not just saving resources — you’re cultivating understanding, rhythm, and pride. These small acts of self-reliance reconnect us with aspects of life that industrial society has obscured. They build competence, confidence, and autonomy — qualities that no market can sell.
Wild Mode asks us to restore our most fundamental relationship: with nature itself. How can we care for living systems so they can, in turn, care for us? A food forest, for example, can nourish both humans and biodiversity more than rewilded land alone. The Wild perspective teaches reciprocity — to take only what regenerates, to learn the patterns of the seasons, and to let nature’s intelligence guide our designs.
Together, these modes reveal that real progress doesn’t come from ever more control or complexity — but from better relationships: between people, communities, and the living world.
Our four eggs come from four different worlds. But in our modern world, Global Mode dominates. It exploits the others, erodes them, and presents itself as the only viable option.
In countries like the Netherlands, Global Mode has made it unsafe to eat eggs from local, domestic or wild birds because of polluted soil. Even keeping chickens outdoor is becoming difficult: rising bird flu and fears of zoonotic disease may soon make it illegal. The system that promised food security is pushing out non-industrial alternatives.
Our instinct is to double down — to solve this with more tech, more control. But this only deepens our dependence on commerce, specialists, and fragile global supply chains, while eroding our ability to act and understand for ourselves.
Global mode: extraction to enablement
We don't advocate for Global Mode to disappear, but to transform. Instead of displacing other modes through; extraction, commodification, and industrialization — it becomes supportive.
In this transformation, Global Mode takes a step back from production. The making of goods, services, and supporting infrastructure — the material and cultural outputs that define daily life — move closer to where people and resources actually live: into Local, Domestic, and Wild modes. By ending the endless conversion of life, labor, and attention into commodities, for economic growth, we end the pressure on ourselves, our planet and all of life.
What remains are its gifts: specialized knowledge, fundamental research, advanced technologies, legal and financial infrastructure, and digital networks. But rather than using these to centralize power or extract value, they become instruments of support.
A supportive Global Mode can help other modes thrive by providing the legal and financial scaffolding that protects commons, cooperatives, or shared land; knowledge-sharing platforms and open-source tools that make local solutions more effective; storytelling and branding that amplify regenerative projects and help them connect with wider audiences; and ethical digital infrastructure that enables trade, coordination, and resilience — without commodification or extraction.
This shift — from domination to support, from commodifying to sustaining — marks a turning point. It’s how we begin to uncivilize the modern world: not by rejecting technology or modernity, but by reorienting them toward life, reciprocity, and renewal.
Wherever you apply this method — in your life, your household, your organization, or your community — the balance will look different. Some modes will speak to you more than others, and that’s the point.
When you rethink your business, you might weave Local and Global. When you design a new food practice for your family, you might combine Wild and Domestic. There’s no single formula — only combinations that fit your context and values. A simple example might look like below.
Industrial society treats the economy as a machine: a straight line from extraction to production to waste. It prizes efficiency and scale but hides the real costs — exhausted soils, fragmented communities, and the quiet erosion of meaning in order to accumulate financial wealth at the top.
Global mode acts as an engine of extraction, sucking in human and natural resources and generating social costs in the form of pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss and polarization and dependencies through industrialization and commodification
The Uncivilize Method pursues a different pattern — one shaped by life itself. In living systems, nothing stands alone. Every output becomes an input, every exchange strengthens the whole. This is the Uncivilize economy: a network of reciprocity that connects Global, Local, Domestic, and Wild modes.
In this web, value is build not just in the global economy, but in communities, households and nature, that are all recognized as productive, while surpluses flow where they're needed most — knowledge, labor, care, capital, materials, products, and energy move between modes.
For example Etsy, a global platform enables you to sell homecraft, that you may have learned from watching Youtube videos.
Energy surplusses from your local energy initiative may be traded via the national powergrid via an energy sharing platform and app.
Newly created wild spaces in the city, give room for nature to buffer water, cool things down and add some beauty.
At a local market run by a farming coop a hobbyist beekeeper trades candlesticks for a stall in the market.
With urban mining, even waste and over-production from industry become inputs for local builders.
Each mode plays its part in keeping this circulation alive — Global amplifying reach, Local weaving community, Domestic nurturing competence, and Wild renewing the ground itself.
When we design with this logic, solutions stop being linear and fragile. They become cyclical, adaptive, and alive. Complexity is no longer a problem to control but a pattern to cultivate — a living order that works with life, not against it.
This is what the Uncivilize Method teaches: to see the world as a web of exchange instead of extraction. To design economies that regenerate instead of deplete. To turn every act — however small — into part of a living network that heals, connects, and renews.
The wisdom we build on
Uncivilize stands on a wide landscape of insight: the convivial tools of Ivan Illich and E.F. Schumacher’s call for “small is beautiful”; Kate Raworth’s Doughnut and Elinor Ostrom’s commons; the low-tech pragmatism of Kris De Decker and Michael Greer; Bayo Akomolafe’s invitation to “slow down in urgent times”; yoga’s yamas and niyamas; indigenous teachings like the Wendigo and the seventh-generation principle. Together they remind us that thriving within limits is an old, shared idea — Uncivilize simply offers a language and practice for our moment.
Curious to see how you can apply these four modes?
We are developing a set of tools that support you in applying these modes to explore how you can cultivate greater wellbeing by pursuing a more balanced mix of modes.